Jackson on the Field

One hundred and fifty two years ago, Stonewall Jackson met his dark fate along the Mountain Road during the battle of Chancellorsville. It was a sudden switch from his first appearance on the battlefield on May 1, which Confederate artillerist Edward Porter Alexander recounted in his memoir:

“Up the road from Fredericksburg comes marching a dense & swarming column of our shabby gray ranks, and at the head of them road both General Lee & Stonewall Jackson. . . . I have had to tell in my account of the Seven Days how Jackson, there, was, for a time, not Jackson; being temporarily under the shadow of a superstition, but, as if to make up for it, he had ever since been almost two Jackson’s, & now at the beginning of this, his last battle—for the sands of his active life had run down to about only 36 hours—when he rode up with Gen. Lee, about noon on May 1st, as a fighter and a leader he was all that it can ever be given to a man to be.”